The Turnaround by George Pelecanos Page B

history, there wasn’t any good reason to apply for a job that came with a pension, health insurance, or a future. He’d been down that funny road. Going out on interviews, employers sensing immediately that he wasn’t “right” for the job, the box cutter scar on his face not helping him, the stink of his life on him permanent. When it was time to talk about his experience, he mentioned his felony convictions and incarcerations, as he was required to. Also, he liked to make straights squirm.
    “It’s only fair to tell you that there are a lot of people applying for this position” (people without rap sheets). “Many of them are highly qualified” (they have been to school past the tenth grade, unlike you). “You seem like a good person” (I’m afraid of you). “We’ll give you a call” (never).
    Sometimes Baker just wanted to laugh out loud in their offices, but he did not. He was a good boy. On the outside.
    Anyway, he had a job, a part-time thing his PO had hooked him up with. It involved bedpans, soiled diapers, trash bags, and mops, but he was on paper, so he had to get himself employed. He was part of a cleaning crew in a nursing home down in Penn-Branch, off Branch Avenue, in Southeast. He had an arrangement with the dude he worked with, some variety of African, who would cover for him when he didn’t come in, assure the lady parole officer that Baker was regularly showing up for work. The African preferred to have his brother, whom he’d just brought over from the motherland, take the hours instead.
    It was at the nursing home that Baker had met La Trice Brown. And through La Trice he’d gotten together with her son, Deon, and his friend Cody. Indirectly, working in that shithole had been good for him.
    “What’s the name of the song and who did it? And don’t say Lou Rawls.”
    “Gimme a second. I’m thinking.”
    At the other end of the bar were two middle-aged white men four rounds deep in vodka. They had been talking loudly about women they claimed to have done, sports they’d never played, and cars they would someday like to own. Now they had begun to argue over the song coming from the juke. It was a popsoul number, heavy with strings. The vocalist had a smooth voice that started calm and grew in drama. At the peak of it, the man sounded like he was about to bust a nut all over the microphone. Baker knew the song but not to name it.
    “ ‘Hang On in There, Baby.’ Johnny Bristol.”
    “What year?”
    “Seventy-four?”
    “It was seventy-five.”
    “I was off by a C hair.”
    “What about the label?”
    “It was MGM.”
    “How’d you know that?”
    “I bought the forty-five up at Variety Records when I was a teenager. I can still see the lion and shit.”
    “You know what this song means, don’t ya?”
    “It means, like, don’t let the world get you down.”
    “No, dumbass. It means, hang your sausage hard inside me and don’t let it go limp.”
    “Inside you? ”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “But it’s a dude singing it.”
    “Okay, so he’s telling a broad to hold on. He’s telling her, hang in there. Try not to come too fast.”
    “Who cares if she comes?”
    “You got a point.”
    Baker did not look over at the fools or pay them any mind. He was into the business section now, reading one of those sidebars they had, “Spotlight On,” where they profiled a successful person in the Washington area. Age, college attended, married to, kids, last book read, bullshit like that. It was in this very sidebar that Baker had first been mentally reacquainted with his man, who had made the big time. Not just an attorney, but a partner in a law firm. Bragging about how he was “involved” with kids in the inner city, had started a charitable foundation in the name of his family, through which he made “substantial contributions” to scholarship funds for “African American” students who were bound for college but needed “a helping hand.” Baker wondered if the